Biologically realistic politics continued

Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way.

First, there is the "state of nature" issue. A longstanding tradition in political philosophy is that humans existed at some stage in a state of nature, that is to say, a condition of living without the constraints of historical society. Hobbes thought it was a bellum omnia contra omnes - a war of all against all. Locke, on the other hand, thought that it was a state of free association of contractually independent agents capable of making a social contract. Both positions are just biologically unrealistic. Humans, if phylogeny is anything to go by, share with their nearest relatives the chimps and gorillas (and possibly orangutans - it's thought by some that the modern populations are in extremis, as a result of human activity of hunting, competition for resources, and logging for building materials and farming land. If so, orangs would have been social animals too before they were forced to adapt behaviourally to scarcity) the social characteristics of living in troops. In phylogenetic terms, this would be a symplesiomorphy - a shared ancestral state. If anything, humans have developed even more sociality than their cousins.

As social animals, humans are at the very least likely to have lived in troops of around 50 or so individuals, in larger bands of as many as 500-1000, according to the best estimates. In these groups, the struggle for social dominance by a few individuals will be balanced by the need to live cooperatively, ensuring that when times are tough, old, sick and juvenile members of the troop are cared for. Moreover, humans lack the kind of sexual dimorphism of gorillas, indicating that our social structure would have been more like chimps, with many males mating even when a dominant male has multiple mates. So while it is unlikely that the late western ideal of single pair bonding for life was our ancestral practice, we will still have formed some kind of family arrangements. If modern forager societies (the "official" terminology for what used to be called "hunter-gatherer" societies) are any indication, relatedness was likely to be tracked for some distance. No nuclear families, but rather extended clans.

A second issue is what we mean by "political". For Aristotle and the Greeks, the polis or city state was the model of civilisation. But this is a very late development in human societies. It arose only when a territorial society came into being with the rise of agriculture. According to David Rindos' The origins of agriculture, agrarian societies started to have to defend territory from marauding invaders, and given that there was a surplus of joules in crops, coupled with a loss of food variety from monocultural crops and livestock, a warrior class became the norm, fed better than the farmers, and therefore stronger and fitter. When the Mary Rose was raised, Henry VIII's flagship turned out to be crewed by stronger, healthier and larger individuals than the social norm of the time. They were better fed and cared for, and trained only in the martial arts and the techniques needed to crew a warship. This pattern is repeated in most agrarian societies as far back as there is agriculture. It's not hard to see the Greek armies as a caste of privileged warriors, living off the best the land had to offer, in return for which they fought viciously to defend the territory needed to raise those crops.

No, the sense of "political" needed here is more like the kind found in Franz de Waal's Chimpanzee politics, in which the troop is in constant dynamism, with alliances formed to overcome pure strength, trade favours, and share in the spoils of food and resource acquisition. In short, not unlike today's office politics, only with higher stakes: survival in the literal rather than figurative or professional sense.

Immediately we have eliminated the libertarian and anarchist ideals. Assuming that the political "ought" implies "can", a plausible society must take into account dominance struggles, trading favours, alliances, and prior social standing before any contracts can be made. The notion of natural right is strained at best. Anarchism is not viable because humans do not live in any state of nature from which individual choices can be freely made. Nor is there an innate right to property, at least not in virtue of the state of nature.

A third issue is the nature of "rational" in game theoretical accounts of social interaction. As noted by a commentator, the term has a number of meanings. The sense I will take as foundational here is that a rational agent is one who seeks the optimal strategies for maximising their self-interest, or behaves as if they do, which is how game theory gets to be applied to genetic evolution - genes have no rational strategising faculties, but as a result of selection, they often exhibit population dynamics that can be described using game theory mathematics.

If humans were rational agents, the so-called Rational Man theory in economics, then they would always act to optimise their return on investments and place in society. But they often don't, because their dispositions to behave are the result of prior selection for situations in which they do not now find themselves. Still, it's a good first approximation, and it allows us to look for deviations from an ideally rational strategy which gives us a clue as to what else might be going on.

So, no "state of nature", and it has been said that we are now in as much of a state of nature as we ever were, only this urbanised environment most humans find themselves in has political aspects that were never had before. The sense of "political" we want here is not ideological, but social, and the notion of "rational" to which we will refer is an abstraction rather than an appeal to the underlying nature of human beings. We may be able to act rationally, but, in my view, it takes effort.